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Video Accelerator Troubleshooting

The Video accelerator optimizes Windows Media live streams that are requested over RTSP. Requests for RTSP-UDP streams are denied by WAAS and the player will automatically request an RTSP-TCP stream. Incoming stream splitting allows multiple clients to watch live video over a single stream on the WAN.

You can verify the general AO configuration and status with the show accelerator and show license commands, as described in the Troubleshooting Application Acceleration article. The Video and Enterprise licenses are required for Video accelerator operation.

Next, verify the status that is specific to the video AO by using the show accelerator video command, as shown in Figure 1. You want to see that the video AO is Enabled, Running, and Registered, and that the connection limit is displayed. If the Config State is Enabled but the Operational State is Shutdown, it indicates a licensing problem.

Figure 1. Verifying the Video Accelerator Status

Use the show statistics accelerator video command to see the Video AO statistics. The following output shows that one incoming video stream from the WAN was split to 10 clients, which removed 9 video streams from the WAN.

To examine the reasons why the video AO is not accelerating video connections, use the show statistics accelerator video detail command. In the example below, the video is not a live broadcast stream but is a video-on-demand (VoD), which is not accelerated.

If videos are not being accelerated as expected, it is often because they are not marked with the live broadcast cache-control header, x-wms-stream-type="broadcast". VoD streams lack this header. Figure 2 shows where to find the cache-control header in the Windows Media Server response to the player, using Wireshark.

Figure 2. Windows Media Cache-Control Header

The URLs for video streams are case sensitive to the video AO, so if a video stream is not being optimized or not playing, carefully check the URL case and verify that the video is still played. Also verify that the video can be played directly from the video server, without using WAAS in the network path, to ensure that the video is playable.

Use the show statistics connection optimized video command to check that the WAAS device is establishing optimized video connections. Verify that "V" appears in the Accel column for video connections, which indicates that the video AO was used as follows:

You can see in the connections above that DRE and LZ optimizations are not used with video, but the primary server connection is TFO optimized. All subsequent connections for the same video stream show a reduction of 100% because they are completely removed from the WAN and instead are split from the primary stream at the branch WAE.

To view similar information from the Central Manager, choose the WAE device, then choose Monitor > Optimization > Connections Statistics.

Figure 3. Connection Statistics Report with Video

The show statistics connection optimized video windows-media command is useful to show the status of all inbound video streams, including the requesting URL. The show statistics connection optimized video detail command is useful to list all the inbound and outbound video streams being handled by the video AO.

Video AO Logging

The following log files are available for troubleshooting video AO issues: